This is a post to talk about a lesser known Mormon hero. My wife has many pioneer ancestors. In reading The Forgotten Kingdom, by David Bigler, he makes a few references to Reddick Allred, who is a distant uncle of my wife. I wanted to highlight a good, Mormon man, relatively unknown, who just did the best he could.
Chapter 5 deals with the Handcart disasters so many Mormons are familiar with. The Martin and Willie Handcart companies started for Utah too late in the year, and ended up stranded in early blizzards in Wyoming. Reddick Allred was part of the rescue team. Here’s what the book says on page 115,
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Back in July, the University of Utah football team signed a player out of California by the name of Joseph Smith. I joked that with his signing, and President Hinckley and President Monson’s status as alums of the U, that it was the “School of the Prophets.” (Joseph Smith had originally set up a School of the Prophets to teach the LDS leadership back in the Nauvoo days.) Well, it turns out that it’s no joke, and comes straight from the mouth of none other than Brigham Young!
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If one searches around the bloggernacle, you’ll find a snarky comment about how the church traded polygamy for statehood, or that the church just wimped-out on polygamy. Such comments don’t seem to take into account how much pressure the US government was putting on the church–it was literally trying to snuff it out if the church didn’t back down from polygamy. I’d like to get into some of these details leading up to the Manifesto. I talked about the Manifesto previously in the context of whether the prophet would ever lead the church astray. It should be noted that the church had been fighting anti-polygamy legislation for nearly 30 years, so I think it should be noted that the Manifesto banning polygamy in 1890 was not a spur-of-the-moment quick capitulation. UPDATE: I just finished Forgotten Kingdom, and I want to add some additional information. I’ve highlighted this in purple below.
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I’ve learned a lot about consecration in the last few books. While most of us know that tithing was instituted as a “lower law” because the early saints weren’t capable of the “higher law” of consecration, I have still learned some interesting things about both tithing and fast offerings. For example, Fast Offerings were instituted due to the grasshopper attacks in 1855. Those of us who live in Utah are all familiar with the famous seagull invasion where the seagulls saved the crops of the saints in 1848. However in 1855 and 1856, the grasshopper attacks were much worse, and the seagulls were overwhelmed.
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I’ve recently been invited to a website called StayLDS.com. Let me quote the mission of StayLDS:
StayLDS.com is dedicated to helping people who are struggling in some way to remain involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after a major shift in (or challenge to) their faith. We are committed to being a supportive, positive environment in which people with any difficulty can commune openly and honestly in a spirit of love and support.
I think I was invited there since I deal with many of the topics in church history that people find problematic. I think it is ok to deal with these tougher issues. I don’t always have orthodox responses, but I strive to put them in proper historical context, and I want to help people stay in the church. In a way, I feel like a missionary. In addition to the resources on the front page, there is a forum where most anybody can ask a question and create a discussion.
One of the people there took great issue with the fact that a gun was smuggled into the Carthage Jail, and he felt like the church was covering up this fact. I’ve known a gun was smuggled to Joseph for years from visits to the Carthage Jail in Illinois, and the tour guides do not try to hide this fact. Anyway, I’ve already promised to post on the book called Carthage Conspiracy by Dallin H Oaks. The writer at StayLDS inspired me to detail the fact that Elder Oaks had already published about the smuggled gun in 1975.
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I always thought the United Order and Consecration were the same thing. I’ve been reading a book called Great Basin Kingdom by Leonard Arrington (former church historian) and learned they are actually different. The basic difference to me seems to be that with Consecration, one gave all they owned to the church, and then were given back “what they needed.” With the United Order, it seems to have originated out of various economic cooperatives established to give fair, reasonable prices and jobs to the Mormons. In some cases, saints could choose to consecrate all their possessions to the United Order, but usually it worked more in an economic cooperative, where fair prices were established for Mormons. If they sold to gentiles, often the gentiles paid more.
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